


Golden Repair

by ProlixInSpace



Series: Viren Week 2020 [3]
Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Boarding School, Bugs & Insects, Family History, First Time Doing Magic, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Magic, Minor Violence, Roommates, School, Teen Years, Viren Week (The Dragon Prince), Viren Week 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23558911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProlixInSpace/pseuds/ProlixInSpace
Summary: The first time Viren actually does magic (as opposed to merely reading about it) it is the middle of the night, in his dormitory at boarding school, for the sake of a friend he is destined to lose.
Relationships: Viren (The Dragon Prince) & Original Male Character
Series: Viren Week 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693006
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Golden Repair

**Author's Note:**

> As with my other Viren Week pieces, this is technically meant to exist in the same universe as The Time That is Given Us, because I basically have one (1) set of headcanons about what lurks in the shadows of canon and I am determined to make them all line up with each other. 
> 
> I don't think I have filled even one of these prompts on the officially correct day so far, they are all either early or late, and this one is no exception. 
> 
> It isn't an official archive warning, but CW for references to non-graphic violence against minors and child labor. Also, light swearing.
> 
> This is for Day 5: Memory

**(Day 5: Memory)**

**Golden Repair**

“I’m _baa--aack!”_ Enias singsongs, swanning into the little dormitory room with his customary flourish. 

Viren doesn’t get up. He peers over the top edge of his book, surveying his scruffy, freshly-returned roommate from the advantage of the top bunk. 

“Rami’ll be on you if you don’t shave,” Viren comments on the patchy teenage stubble, and returns to his text.

“Jealous?” Enias accuses playfully.

Viren’s scoff blows a lock of ash-brown hair off of his forehead. “No, rite of passage though it may be, I can’t say I’m exactly _eager_ to take on yet another chore.”

“Anyway, I’m not about to take grooming advice from someone who was _just_ told off for letting his hair get too long.” He swings his bag in a wide arc and lets it fly onto the lower bunk. From below Viren, he says, “don’t pretend you don’t want to hear how it went.”

Uninvited, Enias climbs the ladder and deposits his gangly self in Viren’s space, the sharp green in the hazel of his eyes standing out at this near distance. This forces Viren to back up against the wall and he draw his legs into a cross-legged sit that mirrors his friend’s. They both hunch -- if they tried to sit up fully straight they’d both bang their heads on the ceiling -- and Viren closes the book around a corner of the blanket to hold his page. 

“You’re alright?” Viren checks. It’s dangerous, what Enias does, and Viren finds his gaze skipping over dust-marked slacks and tears at the elbow and shoulder of Enias' jacket, not to mention the way he cradles one hand in the other. His mind summons worst case scenarios. 

“I’m always alright,” boasts Enias.

“Well then, what was it this time?”

The story that follows has the same beats as most of Enias' stories, but Viren enjoys hearing it regardless. 

For one thing, it gives him spectacular gossip material. While he doesn’t _enjoy_ the rumor mill, he is thirteen and in a boys’ boarding school and participation is mandatory if one wishes to avoid bullying, so he might as well be good at it and wield privileged information. Of course, he and Enias have a system: Viren retells mainly the roguish, dashing parts of the stories, allowing Enias to look coolly mysterious in his refusal to discuss it, while still getting the tales of exploits out there. In exchange, the less glamorous parts, or those compromising to Enias’ employer, are pre-selected for use in trading for the information of others.

It’s a particularly good story. Enias was gone for two whole weeks, and to hear him tell it, he and the other children went not only across the border but beyond even the forest, all the way to just across the edge of the midnight desert in search of astrabeetles, glassflowers, and bottles and bottles of the strange black sand so prized in the making of magical glass. 

The trip _out_ went smoothly enough (children tending to be pure enough of heart not to be detected by dragons who aren't looking for them, and ignored by all but the hardest-hearted elves.) It was the trip _back,_ laden with all that sand, that nearly got them killed. Enias was lucky to come away from it with only a busted up finger, bruised and broken and missing its nail. He recounts with particular misery that two whole bottles of sand were shattered, and his sponsor (the very same one paying and vouching for his presence at the school, and excusing all his absences with bribes to the headmaster) was furious. 

“I took all the blame for it,” Enias explains. Snickering like he’s gotten away with the caper of the century, he says, “if it was one of the younger kids, he’d take it out of their wages, but I don’t _get_ any wages do I? And he can’t exactly take it out of my tuition.”

“He didn’t--” Viren’s seen the marks of failure before.

“Oh, he did,” Enias says a bit too breezily, putting on a show. “Couple strokes of the cane, but so what? It's no worse than what Red Thom gets when he speaks out of turn in class. Better, probably -- Waiur's hasn't got as strong an arm as the headmaster.”

“I’d say it’s better not to press your luck, but by this point Lord Waiur needs you as much as you need him, doesn’t he?” Viren’s eyes narrow.

“How do you figure? It’s not as if there aren't more hungry kids where _I_ came from, as he always reminds me.”

“Enias, he gets to look like a veritable _altruist,_ putting a street urchin through an education. My own _parents_ speak of him as if he’s some kind of philanthropic wonder. If he took you out of here as punishment for failing at a task he’s not meant to ask of you anyway, it’d ruin half of what he gets out of the bargain,” Viren concludes.

“Hey, that’s right!”

“But!” Viren hisses, “that doesn’t mean you take unnecessary risks. Hold onto that capital, you shouldn’t use it until you truly _need_ it.”

Today, they are adolescent, they feel sneaky and powerful and invincible, and it will be years before Viren looks back on these tales with a sense of nausea and fury at what that awful broker put his friend through in the disguise of _taking a poor orphan under his wing,_ all just for his own ends. 

In the far future, when Viren’s own children are as old as he is now, he will lie awake at night looking back and wondering if there was anything he could have done that he didn’t do, to get Enias out of this deal with the devil, to save him.

Could he have persuaded his own parents to pay for Enias’ place at the school instead?

Why didn’t he ever try?

In the present, Enias is scrambling down the bunk bed ladder and back up again with a paper-wrapped parcel in his hands. 

“Listen,” Enias whispers, “I kept this back. Waiur was so mad about the sand bottles he didn’t even notice.”

Viren watches his friend’s callused, fawn-colored fingers (all except the dark bruised one with the missing nail) unwrap the package and reveal the contents: a little glass jar containing a live astrabeetle the length of his thumb. It is nearly perfect except for a single missing leg, which doesn’t seem to bother it overmuch as it wriggles around the bottom of the jar.

A gust of wind comes around the corner of the dormitory building with a whistling groan, like nature itself is sounding an alarm.

“I wanted to use it--” Enias points to the space where the twelfth leg would have been “--to fix my broken finger, but nothing happened. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes.”

“According to the literature” Viren points out, “the whole point is that there is no such _thing_ as ‘having what it takes.’ Not innately. We _all_ have what it takes as long as we know the spell and possess the ingredients.”

Enias only shrugs. “Maybe I messed it up somehow. Maybe it’s like maths, where some people have a head for it more than others. Point is, you’re the smartest guy I know. I bet anything _you_ could do it.”

“I’ve... only ever read about it.” Viren wraps one hand in the other and twists. Even _reading_ about it is little more than a hobby or a personal curiosity. It isn’t as if he’s studied the way an apprentice would.

“Just think,” Enias suggests, “if I could sneak you materials, and you could actually _do_ the spells--”

He cough-laughs. “I’d probably get thrown out, and then where would you be?”

“No one has to know! And anyway, those _official apprenticeship_ rules are just because they don’t want to deal with a bunch of dumbasses like Gresham and his moron friends doing even more idiot stuff _with_ magic than they do without it. You and I aren’t like that. We’re responsible! You’ve never even had a detention! Anyway it’s just a finger.” Under his breath, Enias adds, “And whatever we decide to do with the _rest_ of the bug.”

When Viren really thinks about it, what Enias is asking for isn’t much different from what the amateur kitchen-mages do out in the woods and the farmlands when times get tough. He’d be helping a friend! And Enias is right, rules like that exist simply to raise the minimum standard of behavior, to prevent problems, but this situation isn’t in danger of crossing those lines.

Why _should_ Enias have to wait weeks or months to get the use of his finger back when the solution is right in front of them, especially when he got hurt doing stuff no one _else_ has to do just to go to school? 

Why _should_ only the spectacularly well-connected ever have a chance at actually attempting magic beyond the most basic level? (After all, he’s never heard of anyone becoming an apprentice who didn’t basically know the royal family personally.) Shouldn’t it ideally be at least as meritocratic as any other academic pursuit?

Fundamentally, why shouldn’t life be easier, and better, when the opportunity presents itself? Why do people like the clerics insist on placing needless obstacles in front of perfectly valid and useful methods of accomplishing worthy goals?

This isn’t acting out, this is just doing the _sensible_ thing, like every mage who wrote the books he reads. It’s seeing a problem, recognizing a tool is needed, determining what tool that is, obtaining the tool, and using it to fix the problem. 

What could possibly be wrong with that?

And if he happens to be good at it, if this gives him a chance to make something interesting of himself, whether he’s endorsed by an existing mage or not?

Finally, with a hint of impatience he says, “Do you have the instructions you tried to follow?”

Enias fishes in his pocket and produces a damp, crumpled page obviously ripped from a book (a travesty, but one that can be overlooked for the moment.) He unfolds it and presses it as flat as it's going to get on the bed.

Viren’s gaze skips across the words. Yes, this is simple enough. 

"It's going to hurt," Viren warns. "Time is the domain of the Star Arcanum, essentially this forces your finger to undergo the entire healing process that it would have done anyway, but condensing it into just a few minutes."

"I can take it," Enias insists, and looking at him, Viren believes it.

As the drawn diagram indicates, Viren turns the shiny blue-purple insect on its back before gingerly pinching the leg. He pulls it delicately away from the body, careful that the coxa joint at the base is not lost in the process. (He wonders if this is where Enias fumbled.) The thing squirms, but Viren holds it by the edges of the abdomen, and it cannot open its wings, nor strike him. 

Just at the moment that the joint rips free, there is a blue spark, and Viren concentrates. It is his intention to do magic. This astrabeetle’s leg is the sacrifice. He can feel something, like a cool fog pouring into him, filling him to the edges of his skin. 

To him, the incantation sounds completely ordinary: _Contract the time to mending flesh and bone._ However, Enias’ eyes reflect the light leaking from his own, and the room is briefly illuminated with a cool, pinkish-purple glow. He is inside the vortex, and he knows (from what he has read) that from outside of it, where Enias is, the words he speaks will seem distorted, reversed.

It is like a tug of war with the power he has called, he must _drag_ it kicking and screaming from the air as if he is forcing it through a too-small gap. He drops the still-living (but furious) beetle back into its jar and closes both hands around Enias’ broken one, directing the light there. Enias at first shouts, but then claps his free, unbroken hand against his mouth, a gesture that quickly turns into biting his fist. 

The light fades. 

Enias breathes heavy, unmistakably in pain. He swears against his own knuckles. 

_“Keep quiet,”_ Viren hisses. 

“I know,” Enias says hoarsely back. “I don’t want to get you into--Viren? You don’t look so--”

It is too hot, and it is too cold, and there are sparks lighting up every pore and follicle along his skin. His palms feel like they’re going to crawl away. Colors pop in his vision. Then there _are_ no colors, only a gray that starts at the edges and presses inward to cover the walls, the room, and eventually, Enias. 

This will not be the last time they do this. 

Again and again, Enias will bring him some creature (or fragment of one.) To Viren, they all look like pieces of a puzzle. Each time, there will be a goal: from the mundane (improving the flavor of cafeteria food or clearing a pimple) to the high-stakes (divining the location of a rare beast Enias is meant to fetch for his employer, and enchanting a weapon bring it down more safely.) The only payment he will ever ask is _knowledge_ of what lies across the border, and he will devour that as though starved for it.

And then one day, Enias will go out on a trip like any other, and he will not return. For decades, Viren will assume that he is dead, destroyed by elves or dragons no doubt, and it will add just that _little bit_ more fuel to the flame of his distrust for Xadia. 

(More than twenty years after that he will discover his friend alive and well, living in secret on an isolated bit of coastline with a tidebound elf for a wife. As painful as it will be to deny himself the reunion, he will keep his distance so as not to lead danger to them both.)

Somewhere miles and miles away, he can hear Enias’ voice calling his name once, twice, and then morphing into a panicked cry for help.


End file.
